Ah, if only this were true. The best people may indeed be with you for life – but it could be their life and not yours. The fact is that people die. Some of us learn this brutally as children, many of us are relatively sheltered from it until we get older. Perhaps as children we lose the odd grandparent when their time is up. But sooner or later, we’ll lose people who are really close – parents, siblings, best friends, even our own children.

I’m telling you this because if you haven’t yet discovered it for yourself, it will come as a horrible shock. Even though of course you know it intellectually, the reality is worse than you can imagine. And it will keep happening, all through your life. There will be lulls, and there will also be years when you feel people are dying all around you. And it won’t get any easier to cope with. You may become more attuned to the general idea of it, but each person is precious in themselves, and no easier to say goodbye to for having done it so many times before.

It’s other people’s deaths that give us a sense of our own mortality. It’s hard to believe in your own death, especially when you’re young. As people around you die, you start to realise that one day it will be your turn.

But there’s one thing that makes all this alright. Yes, really, it is OK. Because new people come along, and they take the place of the people who have gone. I don’t mean they replace them, but they occupy a space the same size in our hearts. So as we go through life, we should aim to make room for at least as many new people as there are those who have gone. I never really understood this until I had children of my own. Then I realised that if life stood still, my grandparents, parents and old friends might still be alive, but I’d be missing out on so much – without knowing it – that it wouldn’t be worth it.

Of course some individual deaths are never OK, especially those who die young, or those whose deaths affect the very young. But the principle of people dying is worth having if it means that new people are born. You don’t have to have your own children for this to make sense – other people’s children can bring huge joy into your life (and be a lot less work).

My grandmother had a favourite poem, The Middle by Ogden Nash, which she used to recite, and which sums up my point pretty well:

When I remember bygone days

I think how evening follows morn;

So many I loved were not yet dead,

So many I love were not yet born.